Free If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women by Sarah Helm Page A

Kipling, Hemingway, Remarque and Gide. They were usually either burned or used as lavatory paper, and Hanna had probably picked the book from a latrine’s supply. She hoped to find a chance to read it with her comrades.
    Given that every minute of the day was now regimented by blaring sirensand rules, talking to friends was hard. There were no corners, no hidden alleys for prisoners to slip into unseen. Inside the barracks, the women were so tightly packed together, and so carefully watched – always kept constantly on the move – that individual contacts or formation of small groups was virtually impossible, which was precisely the intention of block living.
    The doctor Doris Maase loathed the constant company of riff-raff, but she phrased her misery carefully in her censored letter home: ‘ I wish I could be built so that stupidity and dullness wouldn’t bother me as much, but I just can’t help it. It may sound paradoxical but with time one wishes to be a hermit instead of always being around people.’
    Prisoners known as Blockovas had been put in charge of blocks and ordered to enforce discipline. Sometimes, just before the lights went out, if her Blockova was not close by, Hanna Sturm tapped on the bunk below where her communist friend Käthe Rentmeister lay, and Käthe would alert another comrade, Tilde Klose, who lay below her. The women would exchange words about Hanna’s latest find, or if the Blockova was in a good mood she might even allow a little conversation from time to time.
    One or two of these newly empowered Blockovas – mostly green and black triangles – behaved like tyrants from the start; certain names – Kaiser, Knoll and Ratzeweit – were already known amongst the political prisoners from Lichtenburg as trouble. But most of these first arrivals had been in prisons together many years and had learned to get along, whatever their backgrounds. A different-coloured piece of felt on their striped jackets wasn’t going to turn them into enemies overnight.
    On Sundays there was some respite. Not everyone had Sundays off work: the Jewish block, Block 11, and the Strafblock prisoners had to labour as usual. There was also a Sunday Appell at midday and cleaning to be done. But in the late afternoon the prisoners all went for an obligatory ‘walk’ – a sort of forced recreational stroll along the Lagerstrasse, done to music. The guards in the gatehouse plugged the public address system into German radio and marching songs blared out, which at least meant the women could chat freely, as the minders couldn’t hear.
    After the marching it was sometimes possible to lie quietly on a bunk, and to wash clothes and be ‘normal’. There was a Sunday dollop of jam, a square of margarine and a sausage. Prisoners lucky enough to have received money from home could spend it in the camp shop, which was situated inside the staff canteen, and stocked biscuits, toothpaste, and soap. During this ‘free time’ Hanna’s group tried to get together at the back of the block to read their book; one read out loud while another was lookout. They couldn’t believe their luck at finding Tolstoy in a concentration camp.
    On Sundays prisoners also read letters from home and wrote back. Aletter was allowed once a month, and in these pre-war days as long as no mention was made of politics or the camp the women could still write at length. In her letters home, Doris Maase talked about how she’d been reading books too. Doris was working as a nurse in the Revier , where she also spent the night. It was still possible to receive packages from home, including books, and there was even a camp library of sorts – a collection of approved books, including several copies of Mein Kampf .
    ‘Today I try to have Sunday,’ wrote Doris to her sister in June 1939. ‘I’m reading Beyond the Woods by [Trygve] Gulbrannssen.’ Doris’s husband, Klaus, was in Buchenwald, so the two wrote censored letters back and forth, reading